Here are some great images for teachers and students to install in SMART Notebook: Non-profit Public.Resource.Org posted this portrait of George Washington as part of a collection of 6,288 Smithsonian low-res images on line on May 16. Image size is about 400x300, 300 dpi. Compressed, the collection is 670 MB. You can also download a 10 MB PDF Catalog of the images. Public.Resource.Org is challenging the language the Smithsonian uses on their website regarding copyrights. Public.Resource.Org contends that this work is covered under 17 U.S.C. 185 and that "The Smithsonian cannot own copyright in works prepared by Smithsonian employees paid by federal funds."
The image collections encompass much of what you would see at a trip to the Smithsonian and around the Mall, including dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, oceanography photographs (tube sponge picture shown here), items of interest on a variety of Americana and Native American subjects. Social science teachers will have a wealth of images to use from this collection.
Much like Grace Hopper and her Univac pioneers had difficulties chasing the bugs out of hardware, it's a challenge to download this collection. Individual images are posted at Flickr.com, but the entire collection can be downloaded (file name: negs.tar.gz) as a tarball from Public.Resource.Org website. It took almost 2 hours to download on a high speed network connection (so I started it and then went out for a haircut). To find a compression tool to convert the tarball zip file into a jpg package, I downloaded PowerArchiver 6.1 (powarc61.exe) started the conversion and went away from the computer for a half hour. When finished, a folder "Processed Negatives" was created and all the images were in the folder. Use the Catalog to reference the jpg file names. The final images and catalog exactly fit on one CD... a pretty nice, tidy package. Thanks Carl Malamud and Marshall T. Rose of Public.Resource.Org!!!
